Pd-list April 1999

pd-list@lists.iem.at

17 participants
22 discussions

Re: writing externals
by Miller Puckette 19 Apr '99

19 Apr '99

I've frequently had things that "worked" just because I had touched a value and it happened to be in the right register for a function to get it. THis kind of bug can hide for years, and eventually appears when one changes versions of OS, compiler, or other "innocent" upgrades! cheers Miller

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Re: writing externals
by Miller Puckette 19 Apr '99

19 Apr '99

Hi all, sorry for teh long silence (the show was a success!) Klaus Voltmer asked about Pd's performance which is inferior to that of FTS on R5000s. There are at least three possible factors: 1. Overall CPU use is probably higher in Pd than FTS because the code isn't anywhere near as carefully optimized (yet) as FTS; 2. Pd doesn't request "real time" status from the IRIX scheduler. I don't want to do that until I've got a bulletproof way to protect IRIX from freezing (as readers have already discussed here.) 3. Pd can actually block trying to write graphics updates to the GUI front end. There is as yet no way to defer graphics updates when the GUI side is busy; I hope to put this in a bit later when I've got the design more stable. So my best answer is that I'm trying to improve things. This problem (from Johannes Zmoelnig) is different: > <P>1) on a PentiumII @ 288MHz and a SoundBlaster-AWE32 in full-duplex mode > (-ada) I get the *permanent* error-message"resyncing-audio". > <BR>Even very harmless patches (like "Test Audio And Midi") don't get anything > This almost certainly means the ADC and DAC are running at different sample rates. Pd doesn't check the audio hardware sample rate. Also, if your ADC and ADC are running at the same rate but aren't synchronized, you'll get the "resync" message occasionally. Then: > > What happened to functions of the following type in release 0.25test3 > (for Win) > class_addmethod(any_class, anyfunction, gensym("float"), 0); > my externals wouldn't work until I changed it to > class_addfloat(any_class, anyfunction); > > Did you do this on purpose ( to distinguish between floats and > "float"-symbols) ? > The correct call would be, class_addmethod(any_class, anyfunction, gensym("float"), A_FLOAT, 0); otherwise Pd won't send the argument. This should be exactly equivalent to class_addfloat(any_class, anyfunction); which is just a convenience routine. > By the way : when I'm opening a patch with Audio already ON the > dsp-engine won't work until I switch Audio OFF and then ON again; > this is quite annoying if other patches are already running... I > experienced this on pd024 only and I never tried it on any 0.25 release, > so maybe you have already fixed it (or maybe this is part of an idea of > some kind of concept I haven't checked and not a bug so it will never be > *fixed*) > > hannes That was a bug which I believe Ive fixed for 0.25. As to the state of the 0.25 release, I'm hoping to work on the documentation some (it's a good way for me to find bugs) and put it out. There's a problem in 0.25 TEST6 that causes the GUI process to crash sporadically on NT machines... I'd like to fix that before making the release. Miller

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on writing externals in pd0.25_3
by Johannes M ZMÖLNIG 19 Apr '99

19 Apr '99

Cheers, Miller ! What happened to functions of the following type in release 0.25 class_addmethod(any_class, anyfunction, gensym("float"), 0); my externals wouldn't work until I changed it to class_addfloat(any_class, anyfunction); Did you do this on purpose ( to distinguish between floats and "float"-symbols) ? -- Johannes M (forum fÃ¼r umlÃ¤ute) ZmÃ¶lnig

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writing externals
by Johannes M ZMÖLNIG 16 Apr '99

16 Apr '99

Cheers, Miller ! What happened to functions of the following type in release 0.25test3 (for Win) class_addmethod(any_class, anyfunction, gensym("float"), 0); my externals wouldn't work until I changed it to class_addfloat(any_class, anyfunction); Did you do this on purpose ( to distinguish between floats and "float"-symbols) ? By the way : when I'm opening a patch with Audio already ON the dsp-engine won't work until I switch Audio OFF and then ON again; this is quite annoying if other patches are already running... I experienced this on pd024 only and I never tried it on any 0.25 release, so maybe you have already fixed it (or maybe this is part of an idea of some kind of concept I haven't checked and not a bug so it will never be *fixed*) hannes -- jOhannes M forum::fÃ¼r::umlÃ¤ute zmÃlnig

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pd-0.25test3
by Johannes M ZMÖLNIG 15 Apr '99

15 Apr '99

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Re: Pd 0.25 pre-release
by Miller Puckette 15 Apr '99

15 Apr '99

HI all, in the 0.25 pre-release (NT only!) the "-adc" flag has been renamed "-nodac" and the "-dac" is now "noadc,", contrary to the usage message that "pd -help" outputs. On SGI I've only compiled Pd for "o32" so far (my SGI machine is 5 years old!) and would like someday to put out an "n32" version which would run quite a bit faster. I would suggest leaving "pd-gui" in o32 so that it works with TK, and only compiling "pd" itself with n32. The two only communicate via sockets and there's no need for them both to be n32. cheers Miller

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using 2 computers
by Michal Seta 11 Apr '99

11 Apr '99

Hello all, So, I'm planning to use pd in a performance. The idea was to use 2 laptops running pd under linux. However, one of the laptops seems to be quite useless as it has no sound input nor output (exept for a built -in mic and speakers...) so I was wondering if using them networked through ethernet would allow me to approximate something of dual processor nature. Haven't experimented with it as we don't yet have ethernet cards. I would appreciate any ideas in this repect. I'm mainly intersted to know what kind and how much data would I be able to exchange between the 2 computers over a (hopefully) 1000baseT ethernet card. Also, relating to the running of pd under root. I've tried to run it as a user and it works fine except for clickes (and obviously I'm not the only one that has noticed it) and I've noticed the same type of clicks when I use MixViews to play large soundfiles. Running audio software as root doesn't seem to have the same side-effect. How can I optimize it? Obviously, I still don't understand the concept behind running pd (or other software) under root vs. user... thnkx ..... .... ...... Michal Seta ...... ..... ....

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Real-time priority
by Larry Troxler 07 Apr '99

07 Apr '99

Hi, I haven't been using PD lately, but thought but the recent messages about running PD as root insterested me. I assume that PD grabs the Posix real-time scheduling algorhihm when running as root. Once, when playing around with the some other real-time audio code, I was able to use a second thread as a sort of software watchdog. The watchdog thread would run periodically, checking and clearing a global flag that the audio thread would write everytime it completed its output generation loop. The watchdog thread ran one priority level higher than the audio thread. This was a while ago, but I remember that the concept seemed to work. Am I missing something with this idea? Larry -- Larry Troxler -- lt(a)westnet.com -- Patterson, NY USA --

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pd linux woes
by est＠hyperreal.org 06 Apr '99

06 Apr '99

Guenter Geiger discourseth: > > There are a few guesses here. Possibly the input is not correctly > started, and the program hangs in a read in kernel code. > You could put debug before and after the read and write, and look > if it really happens there. Unfortunately it hangs so hard that even an strace doesn't work. > > I doubt that's the problem in my case. Coincidentally, I've done a > > lot of work with buffer configuration for my audio driver. :) > > Ahh, very good, still I suspect an audio driver problem. I suspect you're right! The -dac option works for me. I hacked around the soundcard initialization code a bit to see if the problem was there (*many* unclean reboots :) but with no luck. I think my driver just has a full duplex problem. > > It's a PCI128 soundcard. My kernel is the latest update from redhat: > > 2.0.36-3. I *did* modify the sounddriver to fix a bug in the mixer > > map. > > Yes ? I always wanted to do that correctly, there is a separate mixer ioctl > for turning on and of the "monitor feature". Did you implement that ? > My version only uses a "fast hack" to get things done the way I want. > We may come up with a clean version and submit the patch to the author. If you're talking about the separate output channel, a ioctl() for that is in the latest version of the driver. :) > Mhmm, I never tried the PCI128 with 2.0.36, only with recent kernels. > You might try it with 2.2.x. Indeed..the latest drivers seem to require 2.2.x. I expect I'll make the move to that soon. > Here a short quote from a previous thread about PCI128 (just to give a little > bit of hope) > [...] > > (you probably have read all of this already) Uh..well, I should have. :) This certainly encourages me to try the latest kernels and drivers. Many Thanks, Eric

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RE: Preferred Pd platforms
by Mark Danks 03 Apr '99

03 Apr '99

> -----Original Message----- > From: Chris Graham [mailto:chrisgr@mail.quik.com] > Subject: Preferred Pd platforms > <snip> > I'm in the process of buying a new computer, and I'm > wondering what choices > I should make for compatibility with Pd (and GEM). > > I'd appreciate some help with a few questions: > > - How similar is Pd to MAX? If I get the book on MAX > programming, will this be an aid to learning Pd? > IMHO, it would be very difficult to learn Pd without knowing MAX right now. This is starting to change due to some tutorials and help docs, but there isn't too much right now. A book on MAX programming probably won't help, because it won't cover the audio objects, GEM, etc. and will probably focus on a lot of objects which don't exist in Pd. If you can get Chris Dobrian's (sp?) Max/FTS tutorial, then that is probably the best bet. > - What would be a good hardware/OS platform for Pd? What I'm > interested in is stability of Pd on the platform, and very good performance. > WinNT is probably the most stable right now, if for no other reason than Miller and I develop there primarily there. Linux probably has the best performance, but then you have to deal with a lot of hardware/installation issues there... > Because of other software I'd like to run, my preference > would be for an Intel box running NT - around a 450mhz Pentium III. >From This would be fine. If you want to run GEM, then I would suggest a TNT or TNT2 (when it comes out May 1st), preferably with video output. The very high end accelerators don't offer much benefit unless you are doing things like softimage. > If so, then I have these specific hardware questions: > > - suggested sound card > - type midi interface > - amount of ram > - benefit of dual processor capability > The more RAM the better. You can't have enough. In this day and age, 128Meg minimum. Right now, there is no benefit from a dual processor...but it is being looked into. Later, Mark ---------------------------------------- -- Mark Danks -- mdanks(a)stormfront.com -- http://www.danks.org/mark ----------------------------------------

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Pd-list April 1999